The GNOME project has gone very far astray. Their UX "experts" are self-appointed tyrants who want to control how you use the computer and seem to get sick kicks out of telling users that they're wrong whenever users want do something even slightly different. "You THINK you want to change your mouse speed but actually you're an idiot and you're wrong" is a classic example of this.

GNOME is more of a problem than linux itself. It doesn't have to be this bad. More distros could be packaging KDE (or even XFCE?) as the default, but incentives seem misaligned.